Re: lynx-dev Lynx 2.7.1 and 2.8 refuse to render certain HTML documents

[Foteos Macrides]

David Woolley <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Optionally, forget the parsed representation when moving to a different
>> document, keeping only the source bytestream.  This saves memory (or
>> disk) at the expense of CPU time when revisiting the page.
> 
>That CPU time is very significant, and why I would rather not have the
>source cache (which you can do with CERN HTTP, anyway) rather than lose the
>caching of the rendered document.
> 
>Lynx tends to be attractive to organisations where hardware cost is still
>a real issue, and even I find that, when using character mode "Unix", my
>home 386 SX/25 offers no great benefit over the office Pentium 90.  On
>these low spec machines rendering a page can be a significant part of the
>time to display.
 
        Lynx already has the ability to configure the number of cached HText
structures, down to the minimum necessary of two, and Bela was recommending
that caching of sources be *optional*, and the number or total size be
configurable independently of that for the HText structures.  There are now
a large number of circumstances in which a document must be re-rendered, not
just in the case in which a so-called "power user" wants to look at source.
Also, the current design has the dilemma that if you need to re-render a
reply to a form submission, you can't do it without resubmitting the form,
and resubmission may not be safe, so users must be prompted for a decision
on whether to do it, based on considerations that they generally don't
understand.  Nothing about Bela's suggestions precludes not cashing
sources and using a local proxy instead, but it offers greater flexibility
for optimizing Lynx's behavior to a variety of circumstance.  Why are you
insisting Lynx only be able to do what is optimal in you own usual
circumstances?  (There are a lot of things about Lynx that have become
unattractive during the past year and a half, and more are likely to
follow as things presently stand, but your assessment of the circumstances
under which Lynx "tends" to be attractive is very limited, and what you're
insisting on amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy for it.) 
 
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